Prologue

The dread queen drew near.

Her song, haunting and harmonious as a tempest, filled Garin's head. The cliff under his feet trembled with her nearing footfalls. The darkness, pooled beneath the ruined archway in the canyon below, shifted—black yielding to gray, then to dusky scarlet, like fire awoke from the depths.

"She comes," Garin murmured. He couldn’t have looked away had he dared.

"With her usual pomp and aplomb." Wren had a foot propped up on a boulder beside Garin, black curls tossed about the pointed tips of her ears in the unrelenting wind. Despite her irreverence, her voice betrayed her. Warbling mid-sentence, she cleared her throat, then rattled her sheathed sword. It was a habit that had always rankled Garin, and all the more now for the consequences it might bring.

“Don’t.” At her questioning glance, he nodded at her hand still clutching the hilt. “We need this peace. We don’t want to give the wrong impression.”

“Like we could threaten her,” she muttered. But, brash as she was, Wren was no fool. She relinquished her grip on her weapon.

Garin looked back to the cavern and startled. There, gleaming in the gloom, had appeared the queen’s eyes. He’d forgotten what a sight they were. In past encounters, they’d shone bright and bewitching; now, they burned brighter still. Blue and violet twisted around the slitted black pupils that yawned like chasms opening to the hells.

The darkness yielded the rest of her by margins. The long, scaled snout emerged, then the crown of horns upon her plated head. A lengthy, sinuous neck followed, then folded, webbed wings along a spiny back. Legs as thick as the giant trees of Aspar propelled the queen forward. A barbed tail flicked back and forth, menacing as a viper's dance. From head to tail, down her back and sides, she was the deep red of venous blood.

Though they stood high above the valley, as the dragon queen raised her serpentine neck, she loomed over their perch. Garin nearly fell to his knees as she glared down at them from a mere dozen paces afar. Her mouth parted, revealing uncounted rows of teeth as sharp and long as swords. So large was she that a single bite could more than swallow them both.

Yet he and Wren held their ground. Garin didn’t veil his inner song, but let it ring out before the queen. Paltry though it was next to hers, she would still hear it, like a behemoth of the sea might catch the cry of a gull. It pushed back against the swell of the dragon’s hymn, ever a drowning current to the unwary and unprepared.

Wren shifted next to him. A glance showed her eyes beginning to cross before she blinked and shook her head. Garin knew what malady affected her. Lacking the protection of a sorcerous song such as Garin possessed—a song only dragons could gift—the queen’s glamour infected her mind. Fearing what Wren might say in such a state, Garin hastened to find his voice.

"Hail, Great Yvärras—She Who Dances With Fire, Protectress of the World, Queen of the Ava'duala! Long has it been since you honored us with your glorious presence.”

The dragon queen beheld him, silent but for her song. Its notes shifted subtly, the harmonies clashing to become discordant.

”Jenduit. Listener. It is a long journey to this place for mortals. One most perilous.”

Her voice filled his being and rattled in his skull, yet Yvärras never made a sound but for her bellowing breaths. The conflagrations in her eyes spun faster. Garin imagined them as the bowels of volcanoes, the lava eager to consume.

“Look away,” Wren muttered next to him. “Or do you want to end up a slavering idiot cleaning her claws?”

Garin heard the sense in the warning. Averting his gaze, he looked past Yvärras. Yet he still felt the draw of her eyes, whirlpools dragging him toward their center.

“We do not come idly,” he said, tempering his blandishments. “We come at the behest of Ashelia Venaliel, Queen of Gladelyl. Her Eminence wishes to breach the isolation in which dragonkind has enshrouded itself. There is much to discuss, should you be willing. Common threats to our peoples. Alliances from which we might both gain.”

“Alliances.” Amusement rolled like thunder through his mind. “What need have I of allies? We ava’duala are the rightful rulers of this World, manling. In this age, we have no need of Listeners to spread our Songs. Have you not done enough harm to my children, Jenduit?”

Garin flinched. Even knowing Yvärras would barb her every word, the arrow struck its mark. Only Wren’s gaze returned him to their mission.

They could not fail. Too much hung in the balance.

“Alärthoras made his own decisions.” He swallowed. His belly still churned with guilt all these years later, though he knew it should not. “I never dealt him harm, nor have I harmed any Singer. My mind is open to you—you know I speak true.”

“Careful,” Wren breathed. “Don’t invite her in.”

“Silence, little bird.” The dragon queen turned her weighty gaze on Wren. “Before I indulge my curiosity of how a half-elf tastes.”

Garin’s companion stepped forward, hand clenched on the hilt of her sword. As ever, Wren’s need to defy blinded her to threat. He held Wren back with a hand on her arm. 

“Please, Wren,” he murmured, pushing her back. “Leave this to me.”

She yielded, though her expression remained as mutinous as she glared up at the dragon queen.

Acid mirth lanced through his mind. “So easily manipulated. What could your simple minds offer the Mother of Aolas?”

With each arrogant word, Garin recalled their previous encounters with the dragon queen. Instead of wilting before her insults, he straightened his spine and once more met the dragon’s stare. He didn’t exert angry defiance like Wren, but calm confidence, as if he were of dragonkind himself. It took every strain of his song to remain above the pull of her glamour.

“These lands are not yours to pillage and plunder like thieves,” he declared. “Their resources are vital to the survival of the many mortal bloodlines that populate them. The ava’duala are supposed to be the World’s protectors. Or have you forgotten your purpose?”

Yvärras grew still, only the flames in her eyes moving. Then she exhaled, expelling sulfurous air over him and Wren. He fought down a gag. The rotten smell of it made his eyes water and his head spin. Wren flinched as well, no doubt remembering, as he did, how the queen could summon an inferno at her leisure. Without their companions of old to provide protection, they couldn’t hope to prevail.

Still, he didn’t back down. Before, he’d thought to charm the queen with flattery. Now he remembered all the lessons from his time spent among dragons. Above all else, they respected strength. Lacking the power of body, the force of his spirit was all that remained.

It was a deadly gamble, one as likely to end in their deaths as success. But with the ava’duala, no path was ever safe.

The dragon queen rustled her wings and turned her head. She looked down on them with one eye now, the other pointed toward the sky. “I never forget, Jenduit. Least of all an insult.”

An instinctual need to prostrate before the queen stole over him. Garin barely kept his spine straight.

“Once, we were allies. We fought by each other's sides, tore down would-be gods in their tyranny. We have done great things together, Protectress. We could accomplish greater things still.”

The inferno stirred afresh in the lone eye he could see. “The Singers need not mortals to spread greatness.”

“No, you don’t,” he conceded. “All done by the ava’duala is great. But should you ally with the mortal realms of Aolas, we can ensure those great deeds will also be good.”

Amusement slashed across his mind. “And we are to trust in the wisdom of worms what is ‘good’?”

Garin quieted his vexation, turning his song to a softer melody, melancholic and nostalgic in its unresolved progressions.

“Worms, you call us. But once, there was a man who became greater than any dragon. Hunted by immortal enemies, haunted by the deeds he’d witnessed and done, he nearly lost himself to self-hatred and sin. But he didn’t. Instead, he continued his quest for answers, one that could only end in ruin. Only a man, yet he defied kings and queens and all-powerful sorcerers. And, despite all the wounds he’d taken, the friends and family ripped away, though it meant forfeiting his very life, he persisted. And so became a god.”

“A fleeting power.” Yvärras dismissed his anecdote with her words, yet Garin felt the shift in her song. The subtle mirroring of the notes in his.

Garin nodded. “Our lives are fleeting, yes, but we burn the brighter for it. Once, you saw that. Singers and Listeners lived and labored alongside one another. There are things our hands can build that claws cannot. Even you, Great Yvärras, have needs we might meet.”

The dragon queen turned her head to fully face Garin. Her song billowed over him, oppressive as a heavy fog.

“If you must speak,” she answered at last, “then speak of the benefits such an alliance brings the Singers.”

He stifled a relieved breath. It was a victory, however small. Not enough to guarantee their survival, but a step in the right direction.

“As I said, we might provide for your needs.” He gestured to the ruined archway. “Restoring your fortress, for one. And supplying food and sustenance, should you so require.”

“The ava’duala are hunters,” Yvärras dismissed scathingly. “We are not fed like livestock.”

He didn’t follow her down the line of thought, seeing it for a distraction. “A demonstration of your goodwill to the peoples of Aolas would go a long way. Establish peace to forestall any overtures of war.”

“War?” Laughter seared afresh through his thoughts. “Am I to fear your iron claws, your infantile spells? Let the malcontents break upon the walls of the Siv’Dual! Let them fear our coming when we fly overhead!”

The dragon queen flared her wings, the leathery webbing snapping like taut sails. Hundreds of paces wide, they reached either side of the ravine. Garin fought to keep his balance as squalls rank with reptilian musk buffeted over him. Wren clutched his arm, steadying him, until the winds died.

“Our numbers grow with every cycle of the moons,” Yvärras continued. “All peoples and lands across Aolas and beyond will know my reign. They will remember what it is to be ruled by those superior!”

Garin had never been as brave as those he’d fought alongside. The queen’s wrath stripped his courage like a hurricane robbed a tree of its leaves. But he hadn’t traveled for months only to falter at the final step.

“Then that’s it?” he demanded. “You wish your name to be cursed, to be known as a tyrant wherever you go? Yvärras the Cruel? Yvärras the Faithless?”

Wren muttered a steady string of curses the way a priest would a prayer. Garin didn’t look back at her. Even as the dragon queen’s eyes threatened to drown him, he met their challenge with the remains of his resolve.

Yvärras abruptly folded her spread wings. The wildfire in her eyes tamed and slowed.

“I see you, Jenduit. I hear your song. Mender, my lost brother named you. I had always doubted its truth. Yet now, as you stand before me, I see Alärthoras was correct in his choosing.”

Even before such words, praise he’d never believed to hear from the dragon queen, Garin still threatened to come apart. His limbs trembled, the danger to his mortal body almost overcoming his spirit. Yet he thought he understood the sudden turn. Yvärras had been testing him, pushing him and his argument to the limits. She had found merit to his proposition.

So he hoped.

The dragon queen drew closer. Each eye was as large as he, each tooth as tall, a fact once more visible as she parted her maw. His muscles grew so taut he feared they would snap.

“I question the value of alliances with mortal domains,” Yvärras continued. “But you, Listener, I might find propitious. You have known us Singers. My brother’s scent clings to you still.”

The thought of the dragon with whom he’d once been bonded evoked in Garin a measure of strength. “Tell me what you need, Great Yvärras. If you heed my queen’s request, I will do whatever you require.”

The currents of Yvärras’s thoughts lapped over his mind with overwhelming force. Hesitancy. Fury. Fear.

All gave way to resolve.

“One of my brood suffers a grave malady. One I cannot divine.” The dragon queen paused, hesitant at admitting any shortcoming, then pressed forth more forcefully. “Come with me, Jenduit. Enter the Siv’Dual. Witness with your own senses what has befallen my kin.”

Garin peered into the yawning cavern behind the dragon. Prey instinct begged him to flee. Entering its depths was as wise as a boar placing itself on a hunter’s table. 

But this was the opportunity he’d sought for these long, fraught years. The chance to bring a lasting peace to Aolas. To gain allies that might save them from the threat of which few were aware, but came for them all.

Garin glanced at Wren. She shrugged, acting as indifferent as if she hadn’t been as close to soiling her trousers as he’d been moments before.

“May as well take a look,” she allowed, her smile remaining sharp.

He nodded, acknowledging her implied warning, and turned back to Yvärras. “We will follow. And I will do what I can for your kin.”

The dragon queen rumbled her assent. “Then enter, mortals. And pray to your gods you hear what Singers cannot.”

The Protectress of the World turned and sauntered back toward the mountain citadel. Garin and Wren picked their way down to the valley below, then followed Yvärras through the dark archway. He hoped they would reemerge into the light before long.

But when treating with dragons, you could never be certain of survival.